Woodside Advances LNG Projects

Woodside's 3Q operational report, published October 18 and reported by NGW here, also advanced the expected FID for Browse.

The Australian independent in August was expecting Final Investment Decision (FID) on the offshore Browse gas field only in 2021. Now this has been brought forward to 2020. "Discussions are continuing regarding binding, fully-termed agreements to progress a proposed Browse to North West Shelf development," it added. This would extend or boost NWS's LNG export capacity.

It also expects FID on its planned second liquefaction train at Pluto LNG to be taken in 2019. The new train, with between 4- and 5mn mt/yr capacity, is expected to start up in 2024. 

Woodside has awarded a number of contracts as operator of both projects in recent weeks, most notably to Bechtel on Pluto T2 , and KBR for preliminary design work on Browse. 

LNG developers everywhere are accelerating ongoing developments where possible, as an expected transition from a balanced to tight global market has moved in the past year from 2024 to 2022.

Woodside also said that the Chevron-operated Wheatstone LNG completed a planned shutdown in August 2018 to clean and replace strainers in train 2: "The plant was safely restarted August 29." It added that construction of a new gas plant to supply Wheatstone gas to the domestic market was 98%-complete at end-September and expected to start up commercially in 1Q2019.